She is holding it against her chest with both arms, the way you hold something you have just been handed and have not decided about yet. A grey ribbed turtleneck, Linda Evangelista inside it, the 1994 bob falling exactly where it was cut to fall, mouth slightly open, eyes level with the lens. The lighting is doing portrait work. The bag is doing very little, a soft dark envelope of scuffed leather with a buckle at the top, and it takes up a third of the frame because somebody decided it had to.

Capezio began as a shoe shop. Salvatore Capezio was seventeen and newly off the boat from Italy when he set up near the old Metropolitan Opera House in 1887, mending and making shoes for the people performing inside, and for the next century the name meant pointe shoes and rosin. That is a specific kind of authority. It has nothing whatever to do with handbags.

By the autumn of 1994 the name on this bag was a licence. The bags were the business of Holiday Fair, whose president, Steven Hedaya, explained the campaign to Women's Wear Daily in terms that are hard to improve on. What they were trying to convey was "affordable chic." Evangelista had been signed because she "epitomizes fashionable chic." The bag gets affordable, the woman gets fashionable, and the two phrases sit one word apart in the same interview. Before her the ads had used Cindy Crawford posing with the bags in what Hedaya called an all-American, girl-next-door campaign with a casual, weekend feeling. Trading her for the woman who had told the press she didn't wake up for less than ten thousand dollars a day is not an adjustment to the styling. It is a decision about what the reader is being invited to stand next to.

Hedaya laid out the mechanism too. The larger photograph would concentrate on the product; the smaller ones would tell a story, in what he called a spirited soft-sell. So the two halves of the spread are not an accident of layout, they are the brief. The portrait is the story. The other page is the product, and you can watch it work: a bistro table on a pavement, rattan chairs stacked away behind her, coffee and a plate of something at her elbow, a pale ribbed suit with jewelled buttons that is asking to be read as Chanel. The bag sits on the table at exactly her eye height, lit harder than she is.

Underneath, the wordmark in lower case. At the foot of the page, RICH'S and THE BON MARCHE, the department stores where you could actually buy the thing. Running vertically up the left margin, in type small enough to miss, a toll-free number, sitting there against the café chairs and the jewelled buttons.

Up the same margin, in the same small type, the credit: Laspata/DeCaro Studio. Rocco Laspata and Charles DeCaro had picked up Capezio Bags as one of their early accounts, and that same year they were photographing Evangelista on a field in California with a liger and a ringmaster's whip, for a Kenar campaign built around a circus they assembled daily. Two years before that they had sat her among seven black-clad Sicilian women outside a church in Savoca, and Kenar had bought her outright and nearly buried itself doing it.

DeCaro put the arithmetic plainly years later, talking about Kenar rather than Capezio, though the structure is the same one: when Linda did Kenar, she was doing Chanel and every major designer runway, and Kenar sold triacetate suits.

So the page is an assembly. The bags were another company's business, made and sold under licence. The pictures belong to a studio working for hire, borrowing the visual grammar of couture advertising, the black and white, the pavement café, the tweed. The selling belongs to Rich's and The Bon Marché. Capezio licensed out the name, and the name is the part of this page it actually owns. A company that wants to own more than that has to make something, the way Versace patented a metal fabric and took a prize for the textile rather than the silhouette.

The spread was booked to run again in December, which is how a page like this earns out, not by being looked at once but by being there again when you next turn to it. She stays where they put her, chin on her hand at the little round table, looking off at nothing, the bag in the seat where a companion would be.

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